When Covid is over, what buildings do we actually want to see in Britain's cities?
Anyone in any large British city has only to look out of the window to see how their environment is being constantly reshaped in the interests of capital. From my second-floor flat in southeast London, I can see Canary Wharf to the east, clusters of luxury flats and the skyscrapers in the City to the north, and a larger array of seemingly empty highrise luxury flats in Vauxhall to the west. In Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff or Manchester, you’d see luxury flats joined by high-rise student housing, with their rabbit-hutch flats. The tallest edifices in any city will tell you who and what actually rules. Here in Britain, it’s financial institutions and property speculation.
It is hard to see now amid the depression and anger, but the pandemic did briefly show cities acting on the basis of general human need: rough sleepers being housed, mutual aid groups being set up, evictions being suspended. Yet the possibility of any long-term change is rapidly being lost. In November, I took a minor part in something called the People’s Hearing, vetting the proposals for the Bishopsgate Goodsyard – disused since the 1960s – in Shoreditch, where east London meets the City. Proposals for the site, publicly owned by Network Rail, have been batted back and forth for more than a decade: interested parties include the mayor of London, local authorities in Hackney and Tower Hamlets, a longstanding local campaign to use the site for local businesses and social housing, and Hammerson, the developers that have an option on it.
The campaigners believe the proposal was made obsolete by Covid-19. Indeed, the chain retail and hospitality it is based on have been decimated. The developer’s images feature imaginary units – Bon Manger, Coffee Ground’s – signifying chains that may have disappeared when the complex is finally built. So what happens next?
Like anything of this kind now, the People’s Hearing took place remotely. Susanna Kow spoke from her flat in the Boundary Estate, credited as the first council estate in the world, which stands just next to the site. “I am really privileged to be living on the Boundary Estate,” she said. “Every window has access to light, and the estate has lovely courtyards.” This would be literally overshadowed by the proposed skyscrapers of hotels and luxury flats. “Why should we support this if all we get in return is a paltry offer of 60 to 90 low-rent homes?” she asked. “Why can’t this piece of land be used fully for social housing?”
The Boundary Estate, built in the 1890s, has been described as part of a revolution in London housing. It was based upon the idea that local democracy could carve out an alternative to both big business in the City and central government in Westminster. The Boundary’s new buildings – lush Arts and Crafts flats in red brick and tile, lined by trees – were built by the LCC (London county council) works department, a publicly owned and explicitly socialist building company. Its right to exist was contested in the courts by the big builders and their allies in the Tory party.
Kow argued that by rejecting the developers’ proposals and instead embracing the People’s Hearing’s counterproposals, Sadiq Khan could “achieve a new revolution in London housing for the 21st century”. Yet campaigners say that at the official hearing that followed, the current mayor, who is ostensibly the heir to this socialist tradition, didn’t consider such proposals to be realistic. For his part, the mayor argued that “the benefits of the development outweigh the negative aspects”, pointing to the creation of hundreds of new flats, a new park, “affordable workspaces” and public space improvements that have been secured from the developers. It was also argued that there is not enough evidence to suggest the economic consequences
of the pandemic have written off the need for a new development in central London.
There is obviously some truth in this. While some of the sectors that were wrecked by the virus were already in big trouble – the debt-laden elements of retail and restaurants especially – others, such as property, finance and tourism, were doing just fine, at least in terms of money made. Maybe it really is possible that we could, in some ways, go back to normal. The key question is then a completely different one: what do we actually want to see out of our windows?
For a long time, the model of urban development in the UK has been that developers propose something grotesque, and then local authorities and planning bodies scramble around to extract some concessions: some “affordable” or, if you’re lucky, socia-lrented housing, some more (usually privately owned) public space, slightly better architecture. This, in theory, will bring jobs and investment to an area, which are supposed to trickle down to the council estates and flats above shops that still hold out around the new development. We have known for years that this does not work, but it is still extraordinarily rare to see it truly challenged. Where new ideas have emerged, it is in places such as Preston where developers abandoned the city, something which is still very hard to imagine happening in London or Manchester, however bad things get.
In the 1980s, the Greater London Council had a programme of supporting what it called People’s Plans. London’s government would intervene in cases where developers faced off against campaigners and would purchase sites for the benefit of the latter. One of these was actually built – Coin Street, where a steroidal office complex was beaten off by local activists, who then got to build and plan their own development of co-operative housing and small businesses. This still survives, on a site between the National Theatre and the Globe, offering socially rented flats on one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on Earth. Politicians regularly pay tribute to it. What they never do is propose doing something like it.
Yet there are precedents in the past for what activists continue to demand. In the capital, both the LCC of the 1890s and the Greater London Council of the 1980s show what could be done. The pandemic has made the old trickle-down edifice teeter, but to really knock it down will involve action, confidence, and yes, maybe even a little bit of utopianism. After all, it was “realism” that mandated everything – from cuts to public health to untrammelled capitalism – that got us into this mess in the first place.
Owen Hatherley is an author and the culture editor of Tribune. His latest book is Red Metropolis: Socialism and the Government of London